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User: Scareduck

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Comments · 565

  1. "Safe" on Worldwide Support For Nuclear Power Drops · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The demands of perfect safety at all times is actually chasing better designs off the table; "no new reactors" means better designs can't be built.

    Fukushima is an example of how subtly corrupting the "public/private partnership" can be in privatizing gain while pushing risk onto the shoulders of the public.

    Mankind will turn to nuclear power because it is cleaner than the alternatives, because it is energy dense, because it is scalable, and because it is dispatchable (available when we need it). This headline reflects a temporary revulsion from the tsunami, nothing more.

  2. Not so much "renewable" on The Myth of Renewable Energy · · Score: 1

    as "scalable". Solar is really impractical to harvest in large quantities, doesn't work well for baseload generation because of no way to store surplus, needs distribution, etc. I get his point but the title is somewhat misleading.

  3. Cue all the comments from Keynesians on 88-Year-Old Inventor Hassled By the DEA · · Score: 0

    about the value of stimulus, and how all jobs are sacred, even stupid fucked up ones like these at the DEA.

  4. "Aimed at small businesses" on DARPA Requests Replacement To Antibiotics · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The "aimed at small businesses" part is almost certainly hooey, and is being done for political reasons.

  5. Re:Maybe that's the problem. on The Stroke of Genius Strikes Later In Life Than It Used To · · Score: 1

    "Him that doth not work, neither shall he eat" is a lot better than "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us".

  6. Re:It's change for the sake of change on Ask Slashdot: Unity/Gnome 3/Win8/iOS — Do We Really Hate All New GUIs? · · Score: 1

    ^^^THIS^^^

  7. Scott Adams' views on government on Scott Adams Proposes a Fourth Branch of Government · · Score: 0

    are remarkably puerile and shallow, which is surprising for someone who shows such a great comprehension of the pathologies that exist in heavily bureaucratic corporations.

  8. The question reveals profound shallowness on Could Crowd-Sourced Direct Democracy Work? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It confuses technological means with good governance. As others have mentioned upthread, the major consideration of mob rule is no different than without technology. Read your Federalist Papers, then get back to me.

  9. Forget filesystem location, what about LVM? on Fedora Aims To Simplify Linux Filesystem · · Score: 1

    Can't take a hard drive built with LVM and migrate it to another machine with the same name -- i.e. a common operation after a hardware upgrade. I suppose it is possible to rename the logical volume, but this is fairly arcane, and why should I have to do this? ext4 offers no such impediment.

  10. John Henry, please answer the white courtesy phone on The Real Job Threat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your steam drill is calling on line one.

    Seriously, this is the kind of discussion we get from the economically illiterate. There is a story, frequently attributed to Milton Friedman, regarding this sort of nonsense:

    "At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: 'You don't understand. This is a jobs program.' To which Milton replied: 'Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.'"

  11. Garmin already does this on Why Computer Voices Are Mostly Female · · Score: 2

    Garmin allows you to pick from a number of different voices, with different regional accents and languages as well.

  12. Occupy Wall St. And Student Loans on US Student Loans Exceed $1 Trillion · · Score: 1

    I can't find the exact image -- it's a Facebook photo of a friend-of-a-friend (possibly visible here) -- so this Tumblr image will have to suffice. Lately I saw a college professor complaining about how badly in debt his students are and how their lives will start with crippling burdens. Yet for all that, I heard no consideration for the part they played in this drama. Did they offer to take a pay cut? Find a more economical way to teach? The college-for-all movement has heightened costs (expanded the number of instructors required, added facilities and administrative staff) while not materially changing the overall worth of a degree.

    Supposedly, the main reason for getting a college degree is the bump in lifetime earnings, but not all degrees are created equal. Engineering, math, and the hard sciences dramatically pull up the averages for everyone, while the humanities languish. It was this way when I was in college back in the 80's, and it's only gotten worse since. If you're slaving away to get that PhD in medieval literature and racking up $150,000 in debt, you might want to revisit that life plan.

  13. Awesome example of timeline shift on Starships In a Century? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The standard razor for any vaporware tech is,

    "Five years away" = "we have the general physical principles down but there are a lot of implementation details unresolved".
    "Ten years away" = "we're not really sure about the physics, and/or the economic feasibility has yet to be established".
    "Twenty years away" = "some guy wrote about this in a journal and a few people in the field may believe it could work".
    Now, "100 years away" = "Not. Happening. In Your Lifetime, or anyone else's".

  14. Dear humans on Space Is (Not) the Place, Says Professor · · Score: 1, Informative

    Please all die.

    KTHXBAI,
    -- Mr. Science

  15. Try actually watching the video on Ask Slashdot: How Do You View the Wall Street Protests? · · Score: 1

    instead of shooting your mouth off.

  16. Re:The protesters need to refocus their anger. on Ask Slashdot: How Do You View the Wall Street Protests? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Bernie Madoff is sitting in jail right now for ripping off the rich, and they all got their money back.

    The Wilpons allegedly lost as much as $700 million, so maybe you want to substantiate that claim with something.

  17. The chanting is scary on Ask Slashdot: How Do You View the Wall Street Protests? · · Score: 0

    Seriously, the unison call-and-repeat chanting is straight outta Mao, as is the refusal to allow videotaping of a public event.

  18. You're a goddamned moron on Steve Jobs Dead At 56 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Steve Jobs isn't terribly unique.

    Like hell.

  19. It is your recollection that needs work on Neal Stephenson On 'Innovation Starvation' · · Score: 1

    Aside from the Civil Aeronautics Board, which programs or departments did Reagan end? You can't name any because he didn't.

    NASA is a big-government boondoggle. To blame "the market" or "neoliberalism" for its failures is absurd.

  20. Firefox is VERY crashy lately on Chrome Set To Take No. 2 Spot From Firefox · · Score: 1

    Not sure why, but the 6.x releases all seem to have a bunch of crash problems. If it weren't for all the plugins I use that can't port to Chrome, I'd seriously consider migrating. It's worst on the Mac ...

  21. ^^^THIS^^^ on Of Diamond Planets, Climate Change, and the Scientific Method · · Score: 1

    The author of this piece engages in the sophistry of false analogy.

    The climate scientists use computer models whose code has been obscured and incompletely archived, and data which has been kept hidden from the public in an attempt to cherry-pick the "right" results. Claiming this is even remotely similar is nuts.

  22. The punchline on Japan's Richest Man Outlines Renewable Energy Plan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    At bottom, this is a demand for public subsidy. The fact that he does not plan to make money with his initiative is a huge tell, and why this won't succeed. Energy production has been responsible for some of the world's biggest fortunes, yet here Son is saying he's not interested in making money? I smell a rat.

  23. ALL YOUR SCIENCE ARE BELONG TO US on Journal Editor Resigns Over Flawed Global Warming Paper · · Score: 0, Troll

    Anyone publishing anything to the contrary will be fired.

    Retraction Watch has more on this.

  24. The "big oil" fallacy on Solar Company Folds After $0.5B In Subsidies · · Score: 1

    We know where the sun is -- the prospecting costs are zero!

    Yet solar still can't compete without enormous subsidies.

    And to the end users of oil, the subsidies are negated by taxes. Yet solar demands subsidy at both production/capital costs (as in this case) and in production (in the form of feed-through tariffs).

    Try again.

  25. Re:Stop on Solar Company Folds After $0.5B In Subsidies · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Ah, yes. We can make 'green technology' profitable by simply... taking more money from taxpayers and giving it to them.

    Thus the alpha and omega of the greens.

    And of course, the thievery implicit in the demand for more is utterly ignored.